Heroin is a main theme in the novel, especially as Julia is constantly trying to kick the habit. Her uncertain, shadowy presence, therefore, reflects her state of mind. Stewart links her moods and events in an impressionistic way. After a one-night stand with the thoroughly vile Patrick Burden, Julia falls passionately in love. Despite his manifest disinterest, Julia becomes obsessed. Stewart does not explain, or justify, her character’s delusion.

Hopelessness dominates the world-view of Stewart’s characters. At the Wilde cinema where Julia works, the employees had ‘disbanded their hopes and ambitions, one by one, perhaps without even noticing’.

Black humour colours the novel. In one sequence, Stewart contrasts Julia’s smacked-out anomie with her friend’s cooing baby talk. ‘So, Julia, do you ever get the urge?’ her friend asks. ‘You know,’ she smiles. ‘Little ones. Of your own.’ Not sure how to respond Julia offers a non-committal response: sometimes. She then wonders: ‘What would I feed it? Methadone?’

Some of Stewart’s humour packs a punch. When Julia plays a heroin-user in a television drama, she is told she is playing a ‘what’ and not a ‘who’ and that she does not need any make-up, since she looks bad enough already.

Critics have commented on Stewart’s poetic and meandering literary style. The Black Butterfly is no different. However, the novel’s slowness also reflects Julia’s drug-induced haze, where taking heroin is an ‘anti-action’. Stewart imaginatively links scenes through images, or symbols, such as butterflies. Readers are never quite certain what these symbols mean. After hearing that Patrick collected butterflies as a child, Julia gets one tattooed onto her body. Throughout the novel, a black butterfly reappears, epitomising Julia’s emotional confusion (which is also perhaps shared by her society). Stewart writes:

On nights like this her heart pulsated in her chest. It tore at her chest, it would escape. Each beat was like the beat of wings, Julia thought, beating against time and death, beating in fear and defiance – and, inside the theatre, in the dark, the audience’s hearts were heaving in their chests, beating as one in the cavernous dark.

Stewart writes beautifully about despair, be it drug-induced or otherwise. Elsewhere in the novel, in a swimming pool changing room, Julia looks ‘at her pale, etiolated arms, her stork-thin pallid legs … They seemed like some unknown insect’s transposed to her body.’

Over the past decade, Kathleen Stewart has published eight books: six novels and two volumes of poetry. Throughout her oeuvre, there are a few constants: social hypocrisy, female friendship, sexual conflict and how perception affects reality. Most of Stewart’s characters are extreme, either monsters, in the misogynistic male mould, or victims. But the victims are also strangely powerful (especially as it is usually their perspective that drives the narrative). A line from one of her poems reads: ‘I am unmade, a sigh blooms inside me.’ Here, weakness is full of possibility. Stewart is fascinated by the coexistence of apparent contradictions. In another novel, she writes: ‘Outside, Sydney was full of flowers and capricious breezes; inside, nothing stirred.’

In a recent essay, Finola Moorhead has wondered why so many of Stewart’s reviews are based on ‘misreading and [a] vindictive sensibility’. Moorhead writes that many of Stewart’s ‘professional readers bend over to hate’ her writing. Part of their discomfort comes from Stewart’s world-view. While admiring The Black Butterfly, I felt drained afterwards and wanted some of the tenderness found in her poetry to return – if only for a while.